


Devil's Due

by SaltCore



Series: Making Luck [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Hurt Jesse McCree, M/M, Protective Hanzo Shimada, but the magic is handwavey, deadeye is magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 08:54:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14733884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltCore/pseuds/SaltCore
Summary: Even the best need a little luck on their side, and while Jesse figured out how to make is own luck a long time ago, it takes a toll.





	Devil's Due

**Author's Note:**

> This does rely on the previous work in the series, but it just didn't fit quite right as a second chapter.

Jesse’s right temple is throbbing. It’s a familiar pain, but that doesn’t make it any less unwelcome. If he were a different sort of man, he might consider it a kind of penance for getting into a situation that forced him to use the Eye, but he’s not, so he’s just happy to still be on the right side of the grass. He took the Eye in the first place to give himself just that little bit of insurance, that little extra edge when things really went to shit.  

And for a man like Jesse McCree, things went to shit often and hard.

All things considered, he should feel worse. The more he uses the Eye, the faster he’s found and the worse it hurts when he does. He’d had to use it three times over the course of a few days, and that’s more than enough to bring him some very unsavory attention. At least while waking, he can still dodge the pathological anger of that old sore loser, even if he has Jesse’s scent, but he always has to sleep eventually, and when his mind is unguarded it’s almost impossible to hide. But this time, Jesse had lost him in fairly short order. Guess his luck is still holding out.

He tries to open both eyes, but only one cooperates. The other is held shut by a damp weight. He doesn’t need both to see that his room is dark, lit only by the security lights outside, and that it must be well into the night. The scent of heather and fragrant smoke hangs heavily in the air.

Oh.

He doesn’t remember lighting the incense, certainly doesn’t remember treating his eye, but he must’ve. That would explain why he’s already awake. He reaches up to brush aside the cloth, but he meets warm skin instead. He glances up and sees the underside of Hanzo’s chin. Hanzo isn’t looking at him, instead staring forward, and even in the gloom Jesse can see how tense he is, wound tight enough to snap.

Jesse reaches up to pull Hanzo’s hand away from his eye. There’s a moment of resistance, but Hanzo relents and allows it. Jesse rests Hanzo’s hand on his chest, rubbing his thumb against the back, and pulls the washcloth away with his free hand. Jesse knows without having to look that it’s caked with dark stains, the red-brown of old blood and the ashy black of the, the _other_ stuff. Jesse wads up the washcloth and throws it in the direction of his dirty laundry. He’ll have to remember to burn it later.

“What time is it?” Jesse asks. Talking leaves a tickle in the back of his throat that he has to cough away. Hanzo’s hand fists in his shirt so tightly it trembles.

“Almost four,” Hanzo grits out, his voice soft and shaky. He doesn’t sound like himself at all.

Jesse grunts in reply and rubs Hanzo’s forearm until he begins to relax his grip on Jesse’s shirt. Jesse had hoped he might be able to get through tonight without Hanzo finding out. Not because he doesn’t trust Hanzo, but because he knows how he is. He can work himself into a lather over a lot less than this.

Jesse has no idea what it looks like from the outside—it’s certainly hell from Jesse’s point of view—but he knows it’s not good. He remembers getting caught without his supplies and without any stims to keep him awake on a bad op as a greenhorn, and, well, it took a lot to unsettle Reyes, and when he’d woken up that’s exactly what his commander was. After that, he found himself with a stipend and guaranteed leave to go get what he needed whenever he needed it, so long as he made sure Reyes and a few other people Jesse trusted knew what it was.

Hanzo certainly rates as someone Jesse trusts.

Jesse starts to push himself upright. He only then realizes he’d been lying in Hanzo’s lap, and he knows he didn’t start that way. He was alone before, he’s sure of that. He looks around, sees the burnt incense in the glass on his desk and the open plastic bag with what little light leaks in from the window. He remembers now, he was out of incense, except for what was in his bag. He knows he didn’t dip into his emergency stash, he’d planned to tough it out. Which means someone else must have.

“How’d you know?” Jesse asks.

“I didn’t, I had to ask Fareeha.”

“You didn’t have to—”

“I thought you were _dying_.”

Hanzo’s hand flies up to his mouth, like he hadn’t meant to say that. Hanzo squeezes his eyes shut, but even with his mouth covered Jesse can pick out the fear and the exhaustion. He’s still in his gym clothes, and he never sits around in sweaty clothes if he can help it. He must have come straight to Jesse’s room after his workout, maybe he didn’t realize Jesse was already asleep. They hadn’t really gotten to do more than a perfunctory check-in after he got back; Jesse had to do the debrief and after that he’d only had enough energy to eat and clean his gear. He should have known Hanzo would have come to check on him properly. Jesse reaches out and squeezes Hanzo’s knee.

“It’s okay, babe.”

“You don’t know what you looked like!” Hanzo’s words are slightly muffled by his hand. He twists the fingers of his other hand into the bedsheets. Jesse looks away, letting his gaze fall to the floor. “I didn’t know how to help you.”

Jesse’s lips quirk up, in spite of himself. It’s been years since he had anyone worried over him. It sparks a strange kind of nostalgia. He’s not sure they were better days, exactly, but Blackwatch and the people that came with it were all he knew for a long time, and familiarity can come to feel a lot like fondness. He has to admit, he missed having people to watch his back. He’d never imagined how the loneliness of going it alone would wear on him.

“You did all you could.”

Hanzo sighs beside him and twists to flip the switch for the small light beside the bed. It bathes them both in a soft, orange glow, but it also throws strange shadows into the corners of the room that make Jesse uneasy. He has to remind himself that these shadows are utterly mundane. Hanzo reaches out, but then hesitates.

“May I?”

Jesse nods, and Hanzo takes Jesse’s face between his hands, gently tilting his head so his right eye is in the light. Jesse knows he won’t see anything, but he doesn’t begrudge Hanzo checking to settle his own nerves. Hanzo twists his head a little, pulls down his lower eyelid, and then brushes the corner of Jesse’s eye with his thumb. When he lets Jesse go, he still looks tense, still looks rattled.

“You should get some sleep,” Jesse murmurs, reaching across Hanzo toward the light switch. Hanzo’s hand darts out and grabs his arm. His grip is firm, but well shy of painful.

“No, not until I understand what happened.”

Jesse sighs. This isn’t a talk he wanted to have at four in the morning, but if Hanzo is still this keyed up, the only way out is through. And if he’s being honest with himself, he’d done Hanzo a disservice assuming that he could hide it for much longer. Hanzo is much more attentive than that.

“What do you want to know?”

“Fareeha said this was a price. Is _this,_ ” Hanzo makes a sharp gesture between Jesse and the incense, “the only way to pay?”

Jesse laughs, just a little. He can see why Fareeha would think of it like that. It’s not like he’d ever gone out of his way to explain the finer details to her, or anyone else for that matter.

“’Reeha don’t fuck with this, and, frankly, I’d be lyin’ if I said I didn’t like it that way. She spits in death’s eye enough as it is.”

Hanzo’s lips thin, and he glares at Jesse with the imperious kind of worry that seems unique to him. Jesse scratches his fingers through his beard, buying himself a few seconds to collect his thoughts. 

“Ain’t one of those tit-for-tat things. The Eye ain’t mine, and, well, I didn’t come by it honest. And every time I wake it up, its master comes lookin’ for it back.”

“How did you _come by it_?” Hanzo asks.

“By fuckin’ around with shit I shouldn’t’ve and gettin’ damn lucky,” Jesse huffs.

Hanzo very clearly isn’t pleased with that explanation. Jesse figures Hanzo could sketch out the bigger picture for himself already, though he likes details. After all, he’d had his own dealings with the other side. Though, what Hanzo did was _dealing_ , all proper with the pleasantries and the pomp.

“Tricked one of the greater dead out of it when I was fifteen.”

Deadlock kept a witch on the payroll, and there were two in Jesse’s time. The first died, and left the contract to his niece. Jesse had thought it was all bullshit—what good was all that fuss for if the first witch still got beat to death in jail?—but she _knew_ things she shouldn’t, could _see_ things she shouldn’t. She was still young enough to brag, said that her patron could kill with a look and that she knew how to borrow his sight.

And that made Jesse wonder, was she the only one who could borrow things from the other side?

“At _fifteen_ someone let you commune with something like that?”

“Nobody _let_ me do anythin’, I did it on my own.”

Hanzo drops his face into his hands. His shoulders lift as he draws in a long breath and then they slowly sink as he blows it back out.

“Of course you did,” Hanzo mutters. “What would have happened if I hadn’t gotten Fareeha?”

“I’d have a helluva lot worse of a headache,” Jesse answers immediately. “So long as I stay on this side of the veil, he can’t do much but rattle my cage. I’m, uh, technically just borrowin’ the eye for a while, as it were. He’ll get it back when I kick it.”

Well, he’ll get _the right_ Eye back. Jesse did mangle his left pretty good. He wasn’t dumb enough to steal from something that could kill him on sight without covering all his bases, even as a teenager. Turns out, the bastard is a lot worse at killing when he can’t see.

Hanzo looks up him, all his fingers still pressed to his lips, but Jesse can tell he is utterly unimpressed. But it’s not as if everyone could be born into a millennia old pact with a more reasonable sort of spirit. You have to work with what you have, and what Jesse had was the dead thing’s true name, _borrowed_ grimoires, and whole heaps of testicular fortitude.

“That sounds exactly like the kind of plan a fifteen year old would come up with,” Hanzo says.

“Look, I’d be dead a long time ago if I hadn’t, and I got a system in place. It’s worked out so far.”

Hanzo rolls his eyes, but he tugs Jesse into his arms, tucking Jesse’s head under his chin. Jesse relaxes into it, awkward angle be damned. For the first time since he woke up, some of the tension bleeds out of Hanzo.

“You’ll teach me everything I need to know? For next time?” Hanzo asks. It’s not quite a demand. There’s far too much worry in his tone for that.

“In the mornin’.”

Hanzo squeezes him in acknowledgement. He’ll hold Jesse to it, but that’s all right. It means he has people he can trust again.

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, yes, procrastinating by writing thinly veiled meta. Sounds like me. I'm usually hanging out at https://saltytothecore.tumblr.com/


End file.
